Rose bud

Sooner or later, everyone has to try out the droplets-on-petals thing. As usual nowadays, quite small; 3.5 x 5 inches:

I have never been much into drawing flowers, but I may just change my mind - I enjoyed doing this one.

Two more small drawings

Two more of my small drawings - sunset scenes (3.5 inch x 5 inch), on larger paper:

Two new ones

I have been moving house, and suffered from a painful and annoying injury on my index finger, precisely where I grip brushes and pencils. Thus, almost nothing done for a while. And it will probably be a while longer before the injury has healed completely.

But in the meantime, two more small pieces.

A roadside vendor (acrylic on board, 5 x 3.5 inch):

And a sketch of a Jersey cow; same size as the painting:

New year, new pictures

I have been reluctant to post anything, because of my ongoing battle to get my camera to reproduce colours correctly. Greens seem to be particularly problematic, and tend to come out as drab grey, but I have the same problem, to some extent, with all colours.

Oh well, can't let this blog lie fallow, so here are a few new bits and pieces (all in acrylics on board):

A grove of olives; 5 x 3.5 inch (178 mm x 128 mm):

Field of sunflowers, ACEO:

The colour problem thoroughly bedeviled this view of Pretoria's famous jacaranda trees in bloom (3.5 x 5 inch); the rich purple came out as washed-out bluish grey in the photo. Most annoying!

Freshly planted crops (ACEO); a view not seen much in South Africa this year due to extreme drought conditions:

Two matchbox-sized pictures of white stemmed eucalyptus trees:

And a beekeeper at work (178 mm x 128 mm):

Two small drawings

I have been working on developing a style of drawing that is more or less consistent with my current paintings style, i.e. unabashed use of outline, with fairly flat areas of tone, in the post-impressionist manner.

I decided to keep the drawings small - the paper size in these two is 13 cm x 18 cm (about 5 x 7 inches), with the drawings still smaller - 128 mm x 178 mm (3.5 x 5 inches):

A new bunch

Nowadays, I often paint pictures in pairs, with a similar theme and colour scheme.

These are all the size of a matchbox, about 50 x 38 mm:

I had an ACEO-sized piece of hardboard left, was too lazy to go cut some more, and decided to make a single piece, with a Biblical theme - one of my artistic inspirations is the work of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance, when this sort of thing was common in art. Moses confronted by the burning bush:

I like the twisting, rhythmic forms of trees, and in this scene, also liked the cool, dark depths of the forest in the background. So I did a pair of similar ones:

The above pair are both double ACEO sized, i.e. 5 inch x 3.5 inch.

Time for an update

I have been so busy painting that I had little time or energy left to write any updates here. Well, here are some, all in acrylics on board.

I have been focusing on three different sizes of miniature paintings. The smallest of these are the size of a matchbox - 38 mm x 50 mm. It is rather challenging to work in such small format. I seem to have a slight tremor, that I only notice when working with a very minute brush. And I quickly found I had to go buy me a pair of strong reading glasses for the smaller details. Some examples:

I have warmed to this idea of silhouettes against a sunset background. I'm pretty sure it's been done a million times before by others, but it's still fun.

A few more ACEO-sized ones (2.5 x 3.5 inch, or 64 x 89 mm):

And then twice ACEO size, i.e. 3.5 x 5 inch or 128 x 178 mm:

The above just a sampling of some of the better ones, and/or cases where I could get the camera to reproduce the colours reasonably decently. It remains a source of frustration that the photos are almost all rather pale, washed out versions of the originals.